John von Rhein

Yo-Yo Ma has long been one of the most recognizable classical musicians on the planet and, like Riccardo Muti, one of today's most committed spokesmen for the essential role of culture in society. Now that the superstar cellist and Chicago Symphony Orchestra creative consultant is nearing 60, he might be excused for wanting to step back a bit and pass the heavy lifting along to others.

With 10 performances remaining before Lyric Opera closes out its primary season, the company is finding that even a standard crowd-pleaser such as "Tosca" can no longer be relied upon to sell out the 3,400-seat Civic Opera House — hence the blizzard of ads heralding the return of the Puccini favorite to the winter repertory.

How strong is Lyric Opera's belief in "The Passenger" as an artistic and historical document? So strong that the company is surrounding its splendid performances of Mieczyslaw Weinberg's Holocaust-themed opera with a host of related discussions, orchestral and chamber music concerts, a film screening and other events given under the auspices of its Lyric Unlimited program.

Perhaps the most affecting moment among many such moments at the Midwest premiere of composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg's "The Passenger," Tuesday night at Lyric Opera, came after the cast and creative team had taken their bows on stage at the Civic Opera House.

French novelist Emile Zola's naturalistic masterpiece of 1867, "Therese Raquin," teems with so many of the juicy elements on which opera feeds – try adulterous passion, murder, guilt and suicide, for starters – that you have to wonder why the book (and Zola's subsequent adaptation of the novel as a stage play) had to wait more than 130 years to be retooled for the lyric stage.

Riccardo Muti may be a strict constructionist when it comes to his beloved Giuseppe Verdi, but with respect to Mozart's music, his interpretations harken to performance attitudes beloved of earlier generations of great European musicians, especially those immersed, as he is, in the traditional Viennese Mozart style.

Avi Avital and David Greilsammer: The popular mandolinist and pianist collaborate on a program ranging from Bach and Mozart to Bartok and Arvo Part. 7:30 p.m. Friday, Logan Center for the Performing Arts, University of Chicago, 915 E. 60th St.; $25; 773-702-2787, ticketsweb.uchicago.edu

The distinction between public and private kept coming to mind Thursday night at Symphony Center as I listened to the superbly musical German baritone Matthias Goerne taking the Chicago Symphony Orchestra audience through an unusual and deeply rewarding program of orchestrated German lieder.

Chicago a cappella: The vocal ensemble under principal guest music director John William Trotter is joined by the Ensemble Espagnol Spanish Dance Theater for a tapestry of classical and popular music from Mexico, Spain, Cuba and South America. Ole! 8 p.m. Saturday, Nichols Concert Hall, 1490 Chicago Ave., Evanston; and 4 p.m. Sunday, Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago, 915 E. 60th St. (repeated Feb. 13 in Oak Park, Feb. 15 in Naperville); $12-$38; 773-281-7820, chicagoacappella.org

One keeps hearing dire rumblings about the alleged death of German lieder singing, but this rarefied art form keeps demonstrating more than enough resilience to silence, or at least mute, the prophets of doom.

Lyric Opera's imperishable love affair with Puccini's "Tosca" goes back as far as the company's inaugural season in 1954. Some of the greatest sopranos of their day have loved, killed and leapt through the title role here. Such are the vocal and dramatic thrills of this great opera that even audience members who have seen it umpteen times keep returning for more.

At this midpoint of his fifth season as music director, Riccardo Muti appears to be much less interested in introducing Chicago Symphony Orchestra audiences to important new music than bringing them oddball older repertory that has held personal significance for him throughout his long conducting career. He again dipped into his bag of unusual repertory Thursday night at Orchestra Hall.

Contempo: The University of Chicago's contemporary music collective celebrates its 50th anniversary with world premieres by the late Lee Hyla, Huck Hodge and John Eaton, along with music of two artistic directors, Shulamit Ran and founder Ralph Shapey. Eaton and Ran will take part in a preconcert discussion followed by a documentary film. 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Logan Center for the Performing Arts, Performance Hall, 915 E. 60th St.; $25; 773-702-2787, contempo.uchicago.edu

When Lyric Opera opens a new-to-Chicago production of "Tosca" on Saturday night at the Civic Opera House, a conductor with a relatively familiar name – Jurowski – will be leading Puccini's ever-popular melodrama.

Contemporary works that allude to, or directly draw upon, sources of inspiration beyond themselves are tricky things to bring off. The music must be strong enough to stand on its inherent merits, since allusiveness all by itself carries little to no weight.

'The Magic Victrola': Lyric Unlimited's third annual presentation designed to introduce youngsters 5-10 and their families to the joys of opera takes two children on a journey through famous opera scenes, courtesy of an old record player in their grandfather's attic. Members of Lyric Opera's Ryan Opera Center are featured. 3 p.m. Saturday, Civic Opera House, 20 N. Wacker Drive; $20-$40; 312-827-5600, lyricopera.org

American tenor Brian Jagde will replace the previously announced Misha Didyk as Mario Cavaradossi in the first cast of Lyric Opera's production of Puccini's "Tosca," running Jan. 24 to Feb. 5 at the Civic Opera House.

The compelling Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter clearly thrives on collaborating with performers who share her musical intelligence and adventuresome spirit when it comes to exploring repertory of various styles and periods.

The new year is bringing several shifts of administrative authority at the top of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's food chain. The possibility of exciting new ideas, new directions, is in the air. On stage at Orchestra Hall this week, a different sort of excitement prevails – the frisson of gifted young artists striking sparks off each other and the orchestra, and making music that truly engages the audience.

Chicago's classical music producers typically reserve some of the most important events of their seasons for the period from January to early May. Here are 10 such performances, listed chronologically:

Claude Frank, one of the most widely admired American pianists, teachers and chamber musicians of his generation, and a longtime faculty member at Ravinia's Steans Music Institute in Highland Park, died Dec. 27 at his home in New York, three days after his 89th birthday.

It's the season to take stock of the year's musical blessings — also those people and performances that made 2014 not quite so blessed. In that spirit, we present our 38th annual Rheingold Awards. The envelopes, please.

New Philharmonic: Music director Kirk Muspratt is joined by tenor soloist John Irvin, of Lyric's Ryan Opera Center, to ring out the old and ring in the new, at the orchestra's annual New Year's Eve pops concerts. The festive program, to be presented three times on Wednesday, will include Strauss family favorites, themes from Hollywood film classics, a champagne toast and various surprises. WFMT-FM 98.7 will provide a live broadcast of the 5 p.m. performance. 1, 5 and 9 p.m. Wednesday, McAninch Arts Center, College of DuPage, 425 Fawell Blvd., Glen Ellyn; $55-$65; 630-942-4000, atthemac.org

Area churches and concert halls have come alive all month with the seasonal sounds of comfort, joy and rejoicing. This year's abundance of Christmas concerts seems to speak directly to the zeitgeist: Audience members may well feel the need for the spiritual respite such music can provide as an unusually turbulent year limps to a close.

While some orchestras offer musical sugarplums at holiday time, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is giving its public a clear choice this year. The 20th and final annual edition of "Welcome Yule!" focuses on popular Christmas fare while the weekend subscription concerts carry more serious musical intent.

You could hardly have imagined a more textbook example of standard symphonic repertory than the program that brought Manfred Honeck back to the podium roster of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Thursday night at Symphony Center.

In concert, in the classroom, on the radio and over the Internet, Seth Boustead uses every available platform to spread the word that classical music is a living tradition, an art form of vast global-outreach potential that's thriving as perhaps never before.

Devotees of early Romantic Italian opera must have thought they had died and gone to bel canto heaven last week, when two masterpieces of that genre, neither of them overly familiar, opened in downtown Chicago within three days of each other.

Italian opera houses have been rocked in recent years by what appears to be a never-ending series of financial, managerial and labor crises that have given an embarrassing black eye to the country where opera was born.

The idea of presenting Bach in bulk is not new but has gained currency in Chicago in recent months. Barely three weeks after the WFMT Bach Organ Project – a 10-concert series devoted to performances of the complete solo organ works of J.S. Bach – ran its course, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is devoting its weekend subscription concerts to all six of the master's "Brandenburg" Concertos, under Nicholas Kraemer's discreet but invigorating direction.

For decades Lyric Opera shunned "Porgy and Bess," ignoring George Gershwin's self-described folk opera until well after the Metropolitan Opera and other important companies had put the musical establishment's seal of approval on the once-controversial stage work.

Eric Owens freely admits that as a young opera singer trying to build a career a couple of decades ago, he accepted just about every role that came along, grateful just to get the experience and the exposure.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Beyond the Score series has been remiss in not exploring the music of living composers. Creative director Gerard McBurney made amends with his most recent presentation, "A Pierre Dream: A Portrait of Pierre Boulez," a program honoring the eminent composer and conductor in advance of his 90th birthday next March.

The burgeoning career of Pablo Heras-Casado makes the young Spaniard one of Pierre Boulez's most successful conducting proteges. So it seems only fitting that a week of Chicago Symphony Orchestra programs honoring Boulez on his upcoming 90th birthday (the actual date is March 26 of next year) should be entrusted to him.

VIENNA – The applause rose, crested, gathered new energy, much like the restless surges of the Alexander Scriabin symphony Riccardo Muti and his Chicago Symphony Orchestra had ridden to victory just seconds before.

If you want to hear live contemporary classical music in the Chicago area these days, you are far more likely to find it in out-of-the-way clubs and bars than in more sobersided downtown concert halls.

A fourth consecutive year of record-breaking ticket sales and fundraising has put the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association on solid financial footing, this despite a shortfall of roughly $1.4 million between operating expenses and revenues.

Scottish conductor Donald Runnicles will substitute for Jaap van Zweden as guest conductor for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s subscription concerts Thursday, Friday and Sunday at Symphony Center. Van Zweden has withdrawn on the advice of his doctor, according to a statement released by the orchestra.

The concert that opened the MusicNOW season Monday night at the Harris Music and Dance Theater also signaled a closing. Or at least the prelude to a closing. For 2014-15 will mark Mason Bates' and Anna Clyne's fifth and final season as Chicago Symphony Orchestra composers in residence and co-curators of the CSO's valuable contemporary music series.

Riccardo Muti's first full week of subscription concerts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Symphony Center continues the music director's preparation of repertory he and the orchestra will be taking to five European countries in October and November.

"Don Giovanni" has been a shining talisman for Lyric Opera of Chicago ever since it presented Mozart's masterpiece in two calling-card performances in February 1954. So successful was the maiden effort that Chicago opera lovers rallied behind the fledgling company for its first full season, which began nine months later. Since then, it's become a company tradition for Lyric to mount a new production of "Don Giovanni" to mark its major anniversaries, witness the Peter Stein staging with which Lyric opened its 50th anniversary season in 2004.

The Evanston-based Chicago Philharmonic, which began its 25th anniversary season Sunday evening in Pick-Staiger Concert Hall at Northwestern University, does things differently from other suburban professional orchestras.

Since Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra have room in their packed schedule to present only one free concert a year for the general public, let every concert be as enjoyably done as their latest gift to the city and its citizens, given Friday evening at Millennium Park.

Riccardo Muti's towering authority, musical and otherwise, should reassure members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's extended family that stability and continuity will be maintained while management undergoes significant transition.

Millennium Park, the city's lakefront garden of cultural delights, has for its 10 years proved to be an ideal summer place for Chicago's heavyweight classical organizations to drum up box office for their fall seasons while giving something back to the community as a free gift of music.

With choral groups of every size, description and professional status vying for attention in and around Chicago, standing out from the pack often depends on how distinctive a niche each is able to carve out for itself.

There will be no power vacuum at Symphony Center this fall, once Riccardo Muti has entered the building. All eyes and ears will be on the big boss as he begins his fifth season as music director, his authority undimmed. Muti leads off his fall CSO residency with a free popular-appeal concert at Millennium Park that launches his seasonlong Tchaikovsky symphony cycle, a survey that will interface with a Muti-led Scriabin cycle later in the season. After three weeks of subscription concerts under his direction, the maestro and his musicians will depart on a three-week European tour in October and November, which is scheduled to begin in Warsaw and end in Vienna.

The appointment of Jeff Alexander as president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association, which the Tribune reported Tuesday and the CSOA confirmed following a board meeting Wednesday morning, surprised even veteran observers of the American symphony orchestra scene.

For a quarter of a century, the feisty little indie label Cedille Records has stood out as a plucky survivor in a domestic classical recording business that has been buffeted by a slumping economy, vanishing retail stores, the inexorable advance of pop music and other factors.

With several more concerts yet to go this week in Ravinia’s summer $10 BGH Classics recital series, the festival has gone ahead and announced the dozen classical, popular and jazz concerts that make up the series’ fall, winter and spring extension.

Although composer Jake Heggie has focused the bulk of his creative energies on opera over the last couple of decades, between major projects he has returned again and again to his musical heart and soul – telling stories through song.

The San Diego Symphony's announcement Thursday that it has hired Martha Gilmer, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's vice president for artistic planning and audience development, as its new chief executive officer, steps up the pressure on the CSO Association to fill not one but two important administrative posts before very many more months elapse.

The Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra has announced its 2014-15 concert season at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie. All five Sunday afternoon programs will be conducted by music director Alan Heatherington.

The more than 200 solo organ works that bracket the prodigious composing career of Johann Sebastian Bach have long been every organist's Bible. Rare is the organ recital that doesn't include such favorites as the mighty "Toccata and Fugue in D minor" or the "Little" Fugue.

While funding woes are the root of the problems recently afflicting two esteemed Chicago musical institutions, the Beethoven Festival and the Chicago Chamber Musicians (CCM), there's another way of looking at those problems.

American opera producers such as New York City Opera (which suspended operations in October) and San Diego Opera (which in May rescinded a unanimous vote made by its board two months earlier to close the company) bemoan the difficulties of sustaining an expensive art form in dicey economic times.

On Monday, one month shy of serving 11 years as president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association, Deborah F. Rutter will step down from her position to take on another high-profile managerial post, that of president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington D.C.

The cowardly decision the Metropolitan Opera announced last week to cancel its scheduled "Live in HD" transmission on Nov. 15 of its production of composer John Adams' "The Death of Klinghoffer" will deprive potentially tens of thousands of viewers in movie theaters around the world of the chance to see the controversial opera and make up their own minds about it.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association announced at its board meeting Thursday afternoon that two Chicago philanthropic institutions, the Zell Family Foundation and the Negaunee Foundation, have given the parent body of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra the largest gifts in its 123-year history -- $17 million from the Zell foundation and $15 million from Negaunee.

Lyric Opera of Chicago will present the world premieres of two commissioned operas in 2015 as part of its Lyric Unlimited initiative to connect with a wider audience through the creation and performance of new works with broad appeal.

St. LOUIS – From all evidence, a growing number of Chicago opera buffs rely on the Opera Theatre of St. Louis to help satisfy their cravings during the spring-summer dry spell when neither Lyric Opera nor Chicago Opera Theater is open for business.

Concerts presented at Symphony Center over the last couple of evenings have found local symphony orchestras seeking to reinvigorate the classical concert hall experience, either by bringing popular culture into the mix, having different ethnic identities speak to each other on the program, or both.

It's a good time to catch up with Mason Bates and Anna Clyne. With new albums in release, multiple commissions in the works and performances here, there and everywhere, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's busy composers-in-residence aren't exactly standing around waiting for their phones to ring.

David McGill, the esteemed principal bassoon of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the last 17 years, will resign his post in August to accept a fulltime teaching position at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music.

Few of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's periodic forays into the era predating the standard symphonic repertory are as intelligently programmed and engagingly performed as the one Bernard Labadie is directing this weekend at Symphony Center.

If nothing else, the large and enthusiastic audience that turned out for the final concert of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's third residency season, Tuesday night at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, was a rebuke to the doomsayers.

It began three decades ago as a small local competition designed to encourage Chinese music students to learn Chinese repertory along with the Western classical works their teachers were drumming into their young heads. Since then, it has grown into a much broader outreach effort to further a more general awareness of Chinese arts and culture.

Now in his second season as music director, David Danzmayr is well on his way toward establishing his Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra as one of the leading suburban orchestras in the Chicago area. One way the gifted young Austrian conductor is achieving that is to offer programs that challenge his musicians even as they broaden the musical awareness of audience members. He scored a success on both fronts with the concert he led Saturday night.

There are several reasons why Mark Elder has placed so high on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MVP list during the more than three decades he has been appearing here intermittently as a podium guest. One reason seems primary: The British conductor has a special flair for engaging the orchestra players, along with the audience, in programs that depart just enough from the prescribed playbook to make them feel fresh.

As conductor Leonard Slatkin pointed out to the audience at Thursday night's Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert at Symphony Center, it's likely his listeners were more familiar with the music of Mason Bates than that of William Schuman.

One big reason why the symphonic programs Esa-Pekka Salonen puts together are so absorbing is the unsuspected musical resonances that tie together the diverse elements. So it is with the program that concludes the second of the Finnish conductor-composer's two subscription weeks with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra this weekend at Symphony Center.

Esa-Pekka Salonen's guest relationship with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has spanned a remarkably productive 26 years. The period neatly brackets the composer and conductor's rise from being a relatively unknown golden boy of the baton to his achieving international eminence.

It seems rather a shame that Lyric Opera restricts admission to "Rising Stars in Concert," the company's showcase concerts by the young singers of its Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center professional development program, to donors and media members.

It's no secret by now that Riccardo Muti is a man of passionate convictions, especially when it comes to speaking out about the central importance of music to a civilized society. It's a trope central to the Italian maestro's very soul as a world-famous musician who bestrides several nations and several cultures.

It's an interesting coincidence that Riccardo Muti's spring residency at Symphony Center is beginning soon after the end of the Vienna Philharmonic's own residency in New York's Carnegie Hall, part of an extended festival of operatic and symphonic music there called "Vienna: City of Dreams."

No disrespect to soprano Renee Fleming, but the leading attraction of Lyric Opera's Subscriber Appreciation Concert in which she appeared Wednesday night was her co-star, German superstar singer Jonas Kaufmann, the hottest and most sought-after tenor in today's opera world.

Concertgoers look to the Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra to bring them unusual repertory, also thoughtful combinations of familiar and unfamiliar music, they cannot find in downtown Chicago. Music director Alan Heatherington has some of the area's finest symphonic players at his disposal – his small orchestra includes members of the Chicago Symphony – along with the skills to connect in an immediate way with instrumentalists and audience members alike.

Well before the Chicago Symphony Orchestra took up Pierre Boulez's ideas about ridding symphony concerts of their hidebound habits, Mitsuko Uchida was doing something similar at her annual appearances here, mixing and matching small and medium-sized works on the same program.

Most oboe players are famous for being rather neurotic and even a bit crazy. The stereotype derives from all those long hours oboists spend making reeds and having to force air through an aperture no bigger than the eye of a medium-sized needle, all to produce a beautiful sound on a recalcitrant wind instrument.

The annual appearances of the Chicago-based new-music sextet known as eighth blackbird on the MCA Stage series at the Museum of Contemporary Art are among the most anticipated events of the concert season. The ensemble's program over the weekend reflected the group's penchant for stylistic diversity and for championing of emerging talents among the younger generation of composers.

With Chicago Opera Theater now focusing on contemporary music theater works, the responsibility for introducing Chicago audiences to seldom-performed stage works from the 17th and 18th centuries rests on the Haymarket Opera Company. Since its debut in 2011, the Chicago troupe has dedicated itself to recreating this repertoire using historically informed stage direction, movement and design, and played by small ensembles of period instruments.

The recital program given by Russian pianist Evgeny Kissin Sunday afternoon at Orchestra Hall added dimension to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's present cycle of the Schubert symphonies under Riccardo Muti. At the same time, it provided valuable insights into the keyboard music of Alexander Scriabin, whose mystical symphonies Muti and the orchestra will be exploring next season.

Despite the earnest efforts of Pierre Boulez over the last 40 years or so to liberate symphony orchestras from the rigid confines of hidebound tradition – in terms of both repertory and how that repertory is presented to audiences – few if any other classical musicians in positions of such authority have taken up his ideas. And fewer still are likely to do so after him.

Sitting in a packed house of excited, engaged young people at a concert by Third Coast Percussion last week in the University of Chicago's Logan Center for the Arts, I was reminded how much the city's lively – and getting livelier all the time – new-music scene owes to the active involvement of this age group.

Nicholas McGegan has built his reputation as a Baroque and Classical period specialist largely on his 27 seasons as music director of the San Francisco-based period-instrument ensemble Philharmonia Baroque, although he actually is at home in music of all periods. Like his fellow Brits Jane Glover and Nicholas Kraemer at Music of the Baroque, he's perfectly adept at translating his expertise in the period realm to modern-orchestra performances. He is reminding local audiences of that fact with his concerts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra this weekend and next week.

Although it feels as if Chicago will be trapped under a polar icecap at least until the Bears head off to summer training camp, the promise that this, too, shall pass is underscored by the season announcements of the area’s two major summer music festivals.

Microphone in hand, working the room with his usual seasoned authority and quip-filled charm, Riccardo Muti insisted he is "not a sentimental man." He then proceeded to wax sentimental about his ongoing relationship with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Riccardo Muti strode briskly to the podium Thursday evening at Symphony Center, looking as if he were determined to make the most of his locally abbreviated winter residency with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Putting the search for Deborah Rutter's successor in historical perspective, a common thread emerges of challenges met, opportunities missed and varying responses to shifting economics and demographics outside the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Each executive director's successes and failures depended to a great extent on that person's management style and personality; who was music director at the time; how powerful that music director was; the nature of the board and board committee leadership; and many other factors.

When Lyric Opera unveils its new production of Rossini's "Il Barbiere di Siviglia" ("The Barber of Seville") on Saturday night, it will mark the company debut of Rob Ashford, yet another of this season's imports from the legitimate theater, Broadway and television who come to Chicago with little or no operatic staging experience.

Given that the music of Johannes Brahms is so inescapably a part of every concert season in Chicago, an observer might wonder why Symphony Center would want to devote a special series to the German Romantic master. Pianist Emanuel Ax has just the answer, this season bringing us a series of three programs surrounding Brahms' piano, vocal and chamber music with – here's the twist – newly commissioned works inspired by Brahms' music.

HOUSTON – There is a growing catalog of music written in the aftermath of the Holocaust that attempts to grapple head-on with the ineffable horrors of the Nazi era. None has managed to secure a toehold in the regular repertory.

Claudio Abbado, one of the most gifted and widely respected symphonic and operatic conductors of the latter half of the 20th Century, died Monday morning at his home in Bologna, Italy, after a long illness La Scala said. He was 80.

Verdi's "La Traviata" may be the most popular work in the entire Lyric Opera repertory, having appeared in 14 of the company's 59 seasons, beginning with its very first in 1954, when Maria Callas sang the title role. Given the familiarity of the story and its hit parade of beloved arias, some would imagine the work practically plays itself.

With one more week remaining in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s 2013 residency at Ravinia, the festival has gone ahead and released selected program and artist details for next year’s CSO tour of duty at its summer retreat. The residency will run July 8-Aug. 17 and comprise 20 concerts over a six-week period.

On the face of it, it seems like a goofy idea: Recomposing Vivaldi's greatest hit – the ubiquitous "Four Seasons" – music almost everybody knows from its use in countless TV commercials and movie soundtracks, on elevators and over the phone while one is being kept on hold.

Lyric Opera's unprecedented effort this past season to make itself more generally relevant and to provide what general director Anthony Freud calls “a broader, deeper cultural service to more people around the city” appears to have paid off.

A Riccardo Muti residency at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is never entirely about making music. In this second of three season-ending weeks, for example, the music director has gone from directing a Verdi chorus at a riverfront park in Chinatown, to fielding questions from subscribers at a public Q&A. On Saturday he is to deliver the commencement address for the DePaul University School of Music which is awarding him an honorary doctorate.

Having rolled out some pretty heavy artillery to mark the 50th anniversary of the Grant Park Chorus and other musical milestones last summer, what will the 2013 Grant Park Music Festival do for an encore?

Nineteen days ahead of his official retirement date, Dale Clevenger appeared for the last time as principal horn of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Tuesday night’s subscription concert in Orchestra Hall. Riccardo Muti conducted.

Just when you thought it was safe to dip your toe into summer music, along comes Riccardo Muti to say, "Not so fast." The winter classical music season has, insofar as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is concerned, three more weeks to run.

The openness of MusicNOW series curators Mason Bates and Anna Clyne to divergent styles of contemporary composition can cut both ways. On some occasions it can produce stylistic hodgepodges that add up to less than the sum of their components. On other occasions it can yield programs whose contrasting elements set off each other's distinctive musical virtues in ways that are bracing to both ear and mind.

It's that time of year again, time to check out some of the more artistically enterprising U.S. summer classical music festivals. Whether it's a world premiere, an unusual opera, an orchestral or chamber rarity, or a gifted young artist seeking exposure in the off-season, it's all out there for the music-loving traveler. As always, programs and dates are subject to change and should be verified. Happy alfresco listening!

This is one summer when local classical music lovers — and this means you — may want to skip the usual out-of-town cultural expeditions, avoid the hassles of air and car travel, and simply take advantage of the listening bounty that awaits right here on the city's doorstep. A great many concerts cost nothing, including the Grant Park Music Festival, the weekly Rush Hour Concerts at St. James Cathedral in downtown Chicago and the Rush Hour-produced Make Music Chicago, a daylong, citywide celebration June 21.

Enough tremors were unleashed by a huge battery of percussion instruments at Thursday night's Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert that management may wish to have the auditorium walls checked for cracks once the dust from the weekend concerts has settled.

A couple of years ago Ensemble Dal Niente trumpeted its mission as presenting "the fiercest music of recent decades." The Chicago-based group of super-musicians still focuses on championing, commissioning and performing some of the most uncompromising scores being written today, but lately has been fine-tuning its modus operandi to bring a wider spectrum of listeners into the fold.

The performance did not take place quite in the manner Yo-Yo Ma had envisioned for the young members of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. But that was much less important than the skills the newly empowered players took away from the experience. And the musical results from the audience's standpoint were little short of amazing.

A conductor who understands the challenges female musicians of color face is leading the first Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances this week of a work by a black woman composer who faced similar obstacles during her lifetime.

The flood tide of Benjamin Britten performances honoring the great British composer's centenary has barely begun. Both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Chamber Musicians are planning major observances beginning in the fall, and others are certain to follow as we approach Britten's actual 100th birthday in November.

For ages, mankind has been fascinated by rivers, not simply as natural resources and avenues of commercial conveyance, but also as symbols, metaphors and ideas. Countless artists, composers, writers and thinkers have pondered the significance of these wondrous bodies of water and how they impact on culture, society, geopolitics and, closer to our own time, the very future of our planet.

After devoting the three weeks of Riccardo Muti's spring residency mainly to core Austro-German repertory, the musicians of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra probably were in need of a change of pace. And so, for that matter, were audience members.

Famed virtuoso pianists of different generations are passing through the hallowed halls of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra this week, giving the box office a jolt of starpower beyond what Riccardo Muti already has been providing.

Every so often Riccardo Muti likes to remind the local concert public that his Chicago Symphony Orchestra isn't just a superb instrument for the big Romantic, late Romantic and 20th century repertory. It plays Classical-era works with the same dedication, proficiency and, you might say, pride of ownership. The program of Mozart and Beethoven symphonies the maestro conducted Thursday night at Symphony Center served as another of those reminders.

Andreas Mitisek is only half-kidding when he says he's lost count as to exactly how many hats he will be sporting for the production of "Maria de Buenos Aires" his Chicago Opera Theater will open Saturday night at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance.

Stephen Sondheim's music has been an essential part of Anthony de Mare's life as far back as he can remember. "I always felt there was something very unique, almost kind of transcendent, about his shows," the American pianist says today. "There was always this wonderful message in each one."

“A Streetcar Named Desire,” Andre Previn's adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play, has come in for such scathing notices from some critics following its premiere by the San Francisco Opera in 1998 that one approached the Chicago premiere Tuesday night at the Civic Opera House, where it received a semi-staged production under auspices of Lyric Opera, expecting the worst.

The combination of opera and mariachi is not as unlikely as one might think. Both art forms, in the view of Lyric Opera General Director Anthony Freud, tell human stories about love and loss, family and country. Beyond that, said Freud, "mariachi is a unique, joyful, sorrowful cocktail that has the emotional immediacy of Puccini and a sound world as distinct as that of any great composer."

The Ravinia Festival has announced the remainder of its programming for the 2013 summer season. The schedule comprises more than 120 classical, popular, jazz and dance events, presented almost nightly from June 6 to Sept. 15 at Ravinia Park in Highland Park.

Van Cliburn, the immensely talented American piano virtuoso with the down-home charm and big romantic style, whose gold-medal win at the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958 at the height of the Cold War made him a cultural icon for decades to come, died Wednesday at his home in Ft. Worth.

What is it about "Rigoletto" that causes tin-eared stage directors to paint graffiti all over the opera? The new production that opened last month at the Metropolitan Opera, which wags promptly dubbed the "Rat Pack 'Rigoletto,' " updates the story from 16th century Mantua, Italy, to a Las Vegas casino of the 1960s run by Frank Sinatra. Not so long ago, Lyric Opera turned the work into a revisionist screed about 19th century male subjugation of women that had nothing to do with the masterpiece Giuseppe Verdi wrote.

One of the world’s legendary brass players is leaving the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Dale Clevenger announced through the orchestra on Tuesday that he will be stepping down on June 30 from his position as principal French horn, a post he will have held for a remarkable 47 years.

Once again the Grant Park Music Festival is taking the lead among local summer festivals when it comes to presenting eclectic combinations of popular symphonic and choral fare and more adventuresome classical music programming. And it's all free.

From its debut in 2011, the Haymarket Opera Company has thrived by putting on repertory of the sort no other Chicago group has investigated as thoroughly – unusual baroque chamber operas using period instruments and historically informed stage direction, movement and design. These intimate rarities have felt perfectly at home in Mayne Stage, a cabaret-style theater in the city's Rogers Park neighborhood that seats 230 and serves drinks during performances.

Lyric Opera's 2013-14 season will be given over almost entirely to bread-and-butter repertory designed, at least in part, to ensure the company's sizable ticket sales don't flag in a still-weakened economy.

With the Chicago Symphony Orchestra heading home later this week from its tour of the Far East, the CSO Association is wasting no time releasing the programs and artists to be presented during the fall season at Symphony Center.

Without fanfare, Lyric Opera has been systematically retiring elderly opera productions that have outlived their usefulness or have simply worn out with age. A prime candidate for junking was the 1972 Pier Luigi Pizzi production of Puccini's "La Boheme," a kind of corporate apartment house that has seen countless occupants, worthy and not so worthy, over the years. Recent revivals made that dingy and faded show no easier to live with.

Chicago music has long gone gaga over the Brits, and not simply because the city's two leading opera companies are, or were, run by thoroughly capable Englishmen – Anthony Freud at Lyric Opera and Brian Dickie, who retired last year after 13 seasons as general director of Chicago Opera Theater.

The saga of how Ana Maria Martinez resolved her career conflicts, shed her inhibitions and wound up as one of the most sought-after operatic artists of her generation might make an interesting little made-for-TV drama.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra does a thorough job bringing to local attention gifted young conductors who are creating a stir in the podium world. The latest to make his debut on the subscription series is Vasily Petrenko, the 36-year-old chief conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and soon-to-be chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra.

Lyric Opera has appointed Ian Robertson, chorus director of the San Francisco Opera, guest chorus master for the remainder of the season while the company continues to search for a permanent chorus director.

The great gift Mark Elder brings to Chicago Symphony Orchestra audiences at holiday time is that of appealing symphonic repertory, delivered in such a way as to make the whole seem even finer than its components. Such a program greeted a curiously underpopulated Orchestra Hall on Thursday night.

Riccardo Muti, music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, has canceled his scheduled appearances at the helm of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra this weekend because of illness, according to a statement issued by the Musikverein concert hall in Vienna.

GUANAJUATO, Mexico — Oto Carrillo asked, in Spanish, if anyone in the assembly of some 800 teenage students knew the name of the composer whose music he and colleagues from the Chicago Symphony Orchestrahad just played.

GUANAJUATO, Mexico — I joked with Riccardo Muti after the concert here Monday night that if he had won one more award before the Chicago Symphony Orchestraconcludes its tour on Wednesday, the CSO will have to add another trunk to its 15 tons of cargo.

NEW YORK – It wasn't the tumultuous ovation that went on into the night following the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's first Carnegie Hall concert under then-music director Georg Solti back in 1970, but it was loud and it was instantaneous.

NEW YORK — While much of the nation was focused on the first presidential debate Wednesday night, there was no debate among Manhattan's classical music cognoscenti over who the most prestigious musical visitors of the week were, and are.

Compared with just about every other company in the business, Lyric Opera of Chicago continues to ride above the economic turbulence that is buffeting so many of the nation's other not-for-profit performing arts organizations. Not soaring, but riding.

No sooner have the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Riccardo Muti unpacked their bags from their successful tour of Russia and Italylast month than they are making plans for two more foreign trips together next season.

The recent triumphs of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Russia and Italy were all, I'm sure, well earned. But the roaring reception that greeted the CSO musicians Saturday night at the first subscription concert since their latest overseas tour reminded one that any accolades an orchestra may garner around the world begin with its achievements back home.

Lyric Opera of Chicago has shied away from commissioning any new operas over the last decade, at a time when other major American opera companies such as the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Houston Grand Opera and Los Angeles Opera have actively cultivated new stage works from inception to premiere.

Chicago opera lovers impatient to learn what innovations Anthony Freud will put into place now that he is well and truly ensconced as general director of Lyric Opera of Chicago, will have to cool their heels.